Case Studies

TitleMax was experiencing severe limitations with its off-the-shelf software system that was being used to manage daily business operations at each store. The application was a traditional DOS-based system and did not run natively within the Windows operating system. In addition, the application was designed to run a single store location and not to simultaneously manage hundreds or thousands of stores. A variety of other shortcomings were also recognized including a lack of corporate reporting, no real-time processing, and no customizable business rules per state.

Since the legacy application was a packaged product and not custom-built, TitleMax had no means of enhancing and tailoring the application to its current and long-term needs. Given the company’s considerable growth plans, the determination was made by TitleMax management that the existing application could not be a viable long-term solution. TitleMax immediately began seeking a capable vendor that could custom-design a software solution to its specific needs.

Northridge was engaged to design, architect, and construct a custom software application, called "TL Pro", that would overcome the shortcomings of the legacy application and meet TitleMax’s business requirements and growth expectations. Northridge business analysts and software architects worked with TitleMax management to uncover the business requirements by observing, analyzing, and documenting the way the company conducts business at the store and corporate levels.

Northridge designed and constructed TL Pro from the ground up to leverage the Microsoft.NET framework and custom web services for communication between the client application and the server. By keeping a majority of the business logic centralized on the server, updates and enhancements to the system are made quickly and easily without disrupting productivity in the stores.

The solution implemented by Northridge utilizes clustered Microsoft SQL Server database servers connected to an EMC SAN and a load-balanced farm of front-end servers to house the web services layer. Data is replicated at five minute intervals to a reporting environment, providing management with real-time intraday visibility into individual store and overall company performance.